McQuarrie’s mission

A few years ago, shortly after the release of Jack Reacher, the screenwriter and director Christopher McQuarrie gave a fantastically interesting interview to Empire about the ups and downs of his long career. The whole thing is worth reading closely, but it’s even more resonant now, in the aftermath of McQuarrie’s first big success, given how obsessively his thoughts seemed to return to one specific number. Here are three excerpts from the interview, which, remember, was given long before he was attached to direct anything with Mission: Impossible in its title:

If [my career] changes, it’ll change because of circumstances beyond my control. It will come not from the movie I am most proud of, but probably from the movie I’m most convinced is going to end my career. And then that movie will make $750 million dollars and I’ll have hit the fucking lottery, because I’m just focused entirely on execution and not on result.

I have directed. That doesn’t mean that in their minds I’m a director. I directed a movie that made money. Did it make $750 million? No.

The sad irony is that if I make a piece of shit movie that I’m ashamed of that makes $750 million, I can suddenly make those movies.

Compare these quotes to the latest box office estimates for Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, which is projected to earn close to $750 million worldwide, and you have to wonder whether McQuarrie is psychic, insanely lucky, or simply just as shrewd as he’s always seemed to be. (Really, it isn’t all that surprising. As Tom Cruise’s current wingman of choice, McQuarrie probably guessed that he’d get a shot at a genuine blockbuster one of these days, and he didn’t choose that number at random: it’s merely Ghost Protocol‘s global box office take, adjusted slightly upward for inflation.) Whether or not McQuarrie is as ambivalent about Rogue Nation as he was about its hypothetical counterpart, there’s no question that he’s exactly in the position that he once mordantly anticipated: a hit of this scale usually gives a director a punchcard for one free movie, particularly if he clearly deserves full credit for its success. And it’ll be interesting to see what he does with it, especially given the fact that unlike, say, Josh Trank, McQuarrie has arrived at his position after two decades of thinking hard about his role as part of the studio system, and the function that he plays, for better or worse, within that enormous machine.

McQuarrie’s evolution from an angry maverick to a man the studios trust is a progression that he credits to Tom Cruise, starting from their work together on Valkyrie. His thoughts on the subject, as he describes them to Empire, deserve to be quoted at length:

The first thing I was doing to alienate the business was holding grudges. People are gonna fuck me in this business. There’s no two ways about it. And the first thing you have to realize is that they’re very rarely doing it because it’s personal. The truth is that they’re not thinking about you enough. What I want to tell those people that get so frustrated and bitter about this business is: “No one knows who you are to care enough to deliberately screw you out of anything…”

No one’s interested in making your script. They have a huge mandate on their table: all this product that they have to generate and they need people to help them do it. And so I stopped being a person who looked at them as if they were people who were not giving me a chance and started looking at them as people who were terribly lost and desperately in need of help. And I had a certain set of skills that could be used for that. And by looking at them and saying, “You have a movie to make, how can I help you make it?”, my entire life changed.

McQuarrie quickly qualifies this last statement: “Does that make me a happier filmmaker? No. Am I more fulfilled? No. Now I’m working a lot more and a lot more is getting made. But am I getting closer to having the power to make films that I really want to make? No.” And even if Rogue Nation might force him to take a slightly cheerier outlook about his prospects, his thoughts are still worth remembering for anyone who wants to make a living as a screenwriter. Elsewhere, in a recent roundtable interview reported by Collider, McQuarrie goes into greater detail about how that life looks:

I went to a meeting one day with an executive…and he said, “So, what do you got?” And I said, “Nothing. What have you got?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I’m just here to help, man. What do you got?” And he started pitching me his slate, and he started sweating as soon as he started pitching. And I got to sit there and go, “Hmmm, no. What else? Hmmm, no. Not really.” And it wasn’t to torture him, it was me listening to each idea and saying, “Nope, I don’t have anything to contribute to that. I won’t make that better, I’ll cost you more money and I won’t get you there.” And I realized that my role as I walked out of that room was, “I’m here to help. How can I help you make your movie?”

Whether or not this sounds like a life any writer really wants is beside the point. This is the life a successful screenwriter has, or should have, if he or she is realistic about what it takes to survive: a search for missions that are possible.